First Confirmed Reverse Shock in a Gamma Ray Burst

An artist's depiction of a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosive event in the universe. The bursts can produce both forward and reverse shocks as the ejecta slam into the circumstellar material, and measurements of an April 2013 burst taken at wavelengths stretching from the radio to the X-ray, all during the brief lifetime of the burst, find for the first time convincing evidence for the effects of the reverse shock. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA, artwork by Lynette Cook

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the brightest events in the known universe. These flashes of high-energy light occur about once a day, randomly, from around the sky. While a burst is underway, it is many millions of times brighter than an entire galaxy. Astronomers are anxious to decipher their nature not only because of their dramatic energetics, but also because their tremendous brightnesses enables them to be seen across cosmological distances and times, providing windows into the young universe.

The somewhat longer lasting variety of GRB is associated with the death of massive stars. The details of these bursts reflect the nature of the progenitor stars, the structure of the explosion environment, and the composition of the ejecta. Even after the explosion ends, the powerful ejecta generate an afterglow that can be analyzed as the particles plow into the circumstellar material around the progenitor star. Studies of the afterglow find two light signatures: one produced when a forward moving shock slams into the material, and a second kind resulting when a backward moving shock (the "reverse shock") is produced (roughly similar to the way a water wave, encountering an obstacle, spawns a backward moving wave). Both the forward and reverse shocks reveal different details of the cataclysm; the reverse shock is a particularly valuable probe of particle velocities in the burst.

Although in the past there have been some diagnostic hints found of a reverse shock in the radiation, the conclusions were indecisive because they lacked a full decomposition of the radiation into both its forward and reverse components. Each of these components radiates over a very broad band of wavelengths, with each kind if shock characterized by a distinct intensity peak at a different wavelength band. One problem has been that observations over the full range from optical to radio are needed to sort things out, but there is very little time during a burst to collect all the data.

CfA astronomers Tanmoy Laskar, Edo Berger, Bevin Zauderer, Raffaella Margutti, Alicia Soloderberg, Sayan Chakraborti, Ragnhild Lunnan, and Ryan Chornock and two colleagues present extensive observations of a burst that occurred on April 27. They obtained data from radio and submillimeter wavelengths through the infrared, optical, ultraviolet, and X-rays, and all in the short period from 0.67 days to 12 days after the burst. Their careful analysis convincingly finds the signature of the reverse shock, and determines the characteristic velocity of the ejecta as being 99.997% of the speed of light - very fast indeed. This benchmark dataset offers a so-far unique view of the reverse shock, helps to confirm theoretical models, and illustrates to power of detailed, multi-wavelength modeling of GRBs.

Reference: 

 

"A Reverse Shock in GRB 130427A," T. Laskar, E. Berger, B. A. Zauderer, R. Margutti, A. M. Soderberg, S. Chakraborti, R. Lunnan, R. Chornock, P. Chandra, and A. Ray, ApJ 776, 119, 2013.

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics

NASA Sees 'Watershed' Cosmic Blast in Unique Detail

On April 27, a blast of light from a dying star in a distant galaxy became the focus of astronomers around the world. The explosion, known as a gamma-ray burst and designated GRB 130427A, tops the charts as one of the brightest ever seen.

A trio of NASA satellites, working in concert with ground-based robotic telescopes, captured never-before-seen details that challenge current theoretical understandings of how gamma-ray bursts work.

This animation shows the most common type of gamma-ray burst, thought to occur when a massive star collapses, forms a black hole, and blasts particle jets outward at nearly the speed of light. Viewing into a jet greatly boosts its apparent brightness. A Fermi image of GRB 130427A ends the sequence.Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

 

"We expect to see an event like this only once or twice a century, so we're fortunate it happened when we had the appropriate collection of sensitive space telescopes with complementary capabilities available to see it," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos, thought to be triggered when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight, and forms a black hole. The black hole then drives jets of particles that drill all the way through the collapsing star and erupt into space at nearly the speed of light.

Gamma-rays are the most energetic form of light. Hot matter surrounding a new black hole and internal shock waves produced by collisions within the jet are thought to emit gamma-rays with energies in the million-electron-volt (MeV) range, or roughly 500,000 times the energy of visible light. The most energetic emission, with billion-electron-volt (GeV) gamma rays, is thought to arise when the jet slams into its surroundings, forming an external shock wave.

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope captured the initial wave of gamma rays from GRB 130427A shortly after 3:47 a.m. EDT April 27. In its first three seconds alone, the "monster burst" proved brighter than almost any burst previously observed.

In the most common type of gamma-ray burst, illustrated here, a dying massive star forms a black hole (left), which drives a particle jet into space. Light across the spectrum arises from hot gas near the black hole, collisions within the jet, and from the jet's interaction with its surroundings.Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

"The spectacular results from Fermi GBM show that our widely accepted picture of MeV gamma rays from internal shock waves is woefully inadequate," said Rob Preece, a Fermi team member at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who led the GBM study.

NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Burst Mission detected the burst almost simultaneously with the GBM and quickly relayed its position to ground-based observatories.

Telescopes operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as part of the Rapid Telescopes for Optical Response (RAPTOR) Project quickly turned to the spot. They detected an optical flash that peaked at magnitude 7 on the astronomical brightness scale, easily visible through binoculars. It is the second-brightest flash ever seen from a gamma-ray burst.

Just as the optical flash peaked, Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected a spike in GeV gamma-rays reaching 95 GeV, the most energetic light ever seen from a burst. This relationship between a burst's optical light and its high-energy gamma-rays defied expectations.

"We thought the visible light for these flashes came from internal shocks, but this burst shows that it must come from the external shock, which produces the most energetic gamma-rays," said Sylvia Zhu, a Fermi team member at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The LAT detected GRB 130427A for about 20 hours, far longer than any previous burst. For a gamma-ray burst, it was relatively nearby. Its light traveled 3.8 billion years before arriving at Earth, about one-third the travel time for light from typical bursts.

"Detailed observations by Swift and ground-based telescopes clearly show that GRB 130427A has properties more similar to typical distant bursts than to nearby ones," said Gianpiero Tagliaferri, a Swift team member at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy.

These maps show the sky at energies above 100 MeV as seen by Fermi's LAT instrument. Left: The sky during a 3-hour interval before GRB 130427A. Right: A 3-hour map ending 30 minutes after the burst. GRB 130427A was located in the constellation Leo, near its border with Ursa Major.Image Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

Swift's X-Ray Telescope took this 0.1-second exposure of GRB 130427A at 3:50 a.m. EDT on April 27, just moments after Fermi and Swift detected the outburst. The image is 6.5 arcminutes across.Image Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

This extraordinary event enabled NASA's newest X-ray observatory, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), to make a first-time detection of a burst afterglow in high-energy, or "hard," X-rays after more than a day. Taken together with Fermi LAT data, these observations challenge long-standing predictions.

GRB 130427A is the subject of five papers published online Nov. 21. Four of these, published by Science Express, highlight contributions by Fermi, Swift and RAPTOR. The NuSTAR study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an international and multi-agency astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Goddard also manages NASA's Swift mission, which is operated in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., and international partners. NASA's NuSTAR mission is led by the California Institute of Technology and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena, with contributions from international partners.

Related Links

• Download additional graphics from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

• Papers on Science Express

• NuSTAR paper

• "NASA's Fermi, Swift See 'Shockingly Bright' Burst" (05.03.13)

• "NASA's Fermi Telescope Sees Most Extreme Gamma-ray Blast Yet" (02.19.09)

• "Naked-Eye' Gamma-Ray Burst Was Aimed Squarely At Earth" (09.10.08)

• NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

• NASA's Swift mission

• NASA's NuSTAR mission

Francis Reddy

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Explosion Illuminates Invisible Galaxy in the Dark Ages

This artist's illustration depicts a gamma-ray burst illuminating clouds of interstellar gas in its host galaxy. By analyzing a recent gamma-ray burst, astronomers were able to learn about the chemistry of a galaxy 12.7 billion light-years from Earth. They discovered it contains only one-tenth of the heavy elements (metals) found in our solar system. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA, artwork by Lynette Cook.  High Resolution Image (jpg)  - Low Resolution Image (jpg)

Before light from the gamma-ray burst arrives at the Earth for astronomers to study, it passes through interstellar gas in its host galaxy (close-up view, left), and intergalactic gas between the distant galaxy and us (wide view, right). This gas filters the light by absorbing some colors and leaves a signature on the light that can be seen in its spectrum. This "signature" allows scientists to characterize the gamma-ray burst, its environment, and the material between us and the distant galaxy.Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA, artwork by Lynette Cook. High Resolution Image (jpg)  -  Low Resolution Image (jpg)

Before light from the gamma-ray burst arrives at the Earth for astronomers to study, it passes through interstellar gas in its host galaxy (close-up view, left), and intergalactic gas between the distant galaxy and us (wide view, right). This gas filters the light by absorbing some colors and leaves a signature on the light that can be seen in its spectrum. This "signature" allows scientists to characterize the gamma-ray burst, its environment, and the material between us and the distant galaxy. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA, artwork by Lynette Cook. High Resolution Image (jpg) - Low Resolution Image (jpg)
 

Cambridge, MA - More than 12 billion years ago a star exploded, ripping itself apart and blasting its remains outward in twin jets at nearly the speed of light. At its death it glowed so brightly that it outshone its entire galaxy by a million times. This brilliant flash traveled across space for 12.7 billion years to a planet that hadn't even existed at the time of the explosion - our Earth. By analyzing this light, astronomers learned about a galaxy that was otherwise too small, faint and far away for even the Hubble Space Telescope to see.

"This star lived at a very interesting time, the so-called dark ages just a billion years after the Big Bang," says lead author Ryan Chornock of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

"In a sense, we're forensic scientists investigating the death of a star and the life of a galaxy in the earliest phases of cosmic time," he adds.

The star announced its death with a flash of gamma rays, an event known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB). GRB 130606A was classified as a long GRB since the burst lasted for more than four minutes. It was detected by NASA's Swift spacecraft on June 6th. Chornock and his team quickly organized follow-up observations by the MMT Telescope in Arizona and the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

"We were able to get right on target in a matter of hours," Chornock says. "That speed was crucial in detecting and studying the afterglow."

A GRB afterglow occurs when jets from the burst slam into surrounding gas, sweeping that material up like a snowplow, heating it, and causing it to glow. As the afterglow's light travels through the dead star's host galaxy, it passes through clouds of interstellar gas. Chemical elements within those clouds absorb light at certain wavelengths, leaving "fingerprints." By splitting the light into a rainbow spectrum, astronomers can study those fingerprints and learn what gases the distant galaxy contained.

All chemical elements heavier than hydrogen, helium, and lithium had to be created by stars. As a result those heavy elements, which astronomers collectively call "metals," took time to accumulate. Life could not have existed in the early universe because the elements of life, including carbon and oxygen, did not exist.

Chornock and his colleagues found that the GRB galaxy contained only about one-tenth of the metals in our solar system. Theory suggests that although rocky planets might have been able to form, life probably could not thrive yet.

"At the time this star died, the universe was still getting ready for life. It didn't have life yet, but was building the required elements," says Chornock.

At a redshift of 5.9, or a distance of 12.7 billion light-years, GRB 130606A is one of the most distant gamma-ray bursts ever found.

"In the future we will be able to find and exploit even more distant GRBs with the planned Giant Magellan Telescope," says Edo Berger of the CfA, a co-author on the publication.

The team's results will be published in the Sept. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and are available online.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.  cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu

For more information, contact:

David A. Aguilar 
Director of Public Affairs 
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 
617-495-7462 
daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu

Christine Pulliam 
Public Affairs Specialist 
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 
617-495-7463 
cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Hubble Finds 'Smoking Gun' After Gamma-Ray Blast

GRB 130603B, SDS J112848.22+170418.5

Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Tanvir (University of Leicester), A. Fruchter (STScI), and A. Levan (University of Warwick .  More Images

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are triggered by the merger of two small, super-dense stellar objects, such as a pair of neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole.

The definitive evidence came from Hubble observations in near-infrared light of the fading fireball produced in the aftermath of a short gamma-ray burst (GRB). The afterglow reveals for the first time a new kind of stellar blast called a kilonova, an explosion predicted to accompany a short-duration GRB.

A kilonova is about 1,000 times brighter than a nova, which is caused by the eruption of a white dwarf. Such a stellar blast, however, is only 1/10th to 1/100th the brightness of a typical supernova, the self-detonation of a massive star.

Gamma-ray bursts are mysterious flashes of intense high-energy radiation that appear from random directions in space. Short-duration blasts last at most a few seconds, but they sometimes generate faint afterglows in visible and near-infrared light that continue for several hours or days.

The afterglows have helped astronomers determine that GRBs lie in distant galaxies. The cause of short-duration GRBs, however, remains a mystery. The most popular theory is that astronomers are witnessing the energy released as two compact objects crash together. But, until now, astronomers have not gathered enough strong evidence to prove it, say researchers.

A team of researchers led by Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom has used Hubble to study a recent short-duration burst in near-infrared light. The observations revealed the fading afterglow of a kilonova explosion, providing the "smoking gun" evidence for the merger hypothesis.

"This observation finally solves the mystery of the origin of short gamma-ray bursts," Tanvir said. "Many astronomers, including our group, have already provided a great deal of evidence that long-duration gamma-ray bursts (those lasting more than two seconds) are produced by the collapse of extremely massive stars. But we only had weak circumstantial evidence that short bursts were produced by the merger of compact objects. This result now appears to provide definitive proof supporting that scenario."

Astrophysicists have predicted that short-duration GRBs are created when a pair of super-dense neutron stars in a binary system spiral together. This event happens as the system emits gravitational radiation, tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time. The energy dissipated by the waves causes the two objects to sweep closer together. In the final milliseconds, as the two objects merge, the death spiral kicks out highly radioactive material. This material heats up and expands, emitting a burst of light. This powerful kilonova blast emits as much visible and near-infrared light every second as the Sun does every few years. A kilonova lasts for about a week.

In a recent science paper Jennifer Barnes and Daniel Kasen of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presented new calculations predicting how kilonovas should look. They predicted that the same hot plasma producing the radiation will also act to block the visible light, causing the gusher of energy from the kilonova to flood out in near-infrared light over several days.

An unexpected opportunity to test this model came on June 3 when NASA's Swift Space Telescope picked up the extremely bright gamma-ray burst, cataloged as GRB 130603B, in a galaxy located almost 4 billion light-years away. Although the initial blast of gamma rays lasted just one-tenth of a second, it was roughly 100 billion times brighter than the subsequent kilonova flash.

The visible-light afterglow was detected at the William Herschel Telescope and its distance was determined with the Gran Telescopio Canarias, both located in the Canary Islands.

"We quickly realized this was a chance to test Barnes' and Kasen's new theory by using Hubble to hunt for a kilonova in near-infrared light," Tanvir said. The calculations suggested that the light would most likely be brightest in near-infrared wavelengths about 3 to 11 days after the initial blast. The researchers needed to act quickly before the light faded, so they requested Director's Discretionary Observing Time with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.

On June 12-13 Hubble searched the location of the initial burst, spotting a faint red object. An independent analysis of the data from another research team confirmed the detection. Subsequent Hubble observations three weeks later, on July 3, revealed that the source had faded away, therefore providing the key evidence it was the fireball from an explosive event.

"Previously, astronomers had been looking at the aftermath of short-period bursts largely in optical light, and were not really finding anything besides the light of the gamma-ray burst itself," explained Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., a member of Tanvir's research team. "But this new theory predicts that when you compare near-infrared and optical images of a short gamma-ray burst about a week after the blast, the kilonova should pop out in the infrared, and that's exactly what we're seeing."

In addition to confirming the nature of short GRBs, the discovery has two important implications. First, the origin of many heavy chemical elements in the universe, including gold and platinum, has long been a puzzle. Kilonovas are predicted to form such elements in abundance, spraying them out into space where they could become part of future generations of stars and planets.

Second, the mergers of compact objects are also expected to emit intense gravitational waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein. Gravity waves have not yet been discovered, but new instruments under development may make the first detections within a few years. "Now it seems that by hunting for kilonovas, astronomers may be able to tie together the events giving rise to both phenomena," Tanvir said.

The team's results will appear online on Aug. 3 in the journal Nature.

CONTACT

Donna Weaver / Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4493 / 410-339-4514
dweaver@stsci.edu / villard@stsci.edu

Nial Tanvir
University of Leicester, Leicester, U.K.
011-44-7980-136499
nrt3@le.ac.uk

Andy Fruchter
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-5018
fruchter@stsci.edu

Earth's Gold Came from Colliding Dead Stars

 

This artist's conception portrays two neutron stars at the moment of collision. New observations confirm that colliding neutron stars produce short gamma-ray bursts. Such collisions produce rare heavy elements, including gold. All Earth's gold likely came from colliding neutron stars.  Credit: Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital, Inc.  High Resolution Image (jpg) - Low Resolution Image (jpg) - More images

This animation shows the collision and merger of two neutron stars. Merging neutron stars can create an event known as a short gamma-ray burst.Credit: Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital, Inc. Low Resolution Image (jpg) - Animation (mov)

Cambridge, MA - We value gold for many reasons: its beauty, its usefulness as jewelry, and its rarity. Gold is rare on Earth in part because it's also rare in the universe. Unlike elements like carbon or iron, it cannot be created within a star. Instead, it must be born in a more cataclysmic event - like one that occurred last month known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB). Observations of this GRB provide evidence that it resulted from the collision of two neutron stars - the dead cores of stars that previously exploded as supernovae. Moreover, a unique glow that persisted for days at the GRB location potentially signifies the creation of substantial amounts of heavy elements - including gold. 

"We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as 10 moon masses - quite a lot of bling!" says lead author Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). 

Berger presented the finding today in a press conference at the CfA in Cambridge, Mass. 

A gamma-ray burst is a flash of high-energy light (gamma rays) from an extremely energetic explosion. Most are found in the distant universe. Berger and his colleagues studied GRB 130603B which, at a distance of 3.9 billion light-years from Earth, is one of the nearest bursts seen to date.

Gamma-ray bursts come in two varieties - long and short - depending on how long the flash of gamma rays lasts. GRB 130603B, detected by NASA's Swift satellite on June 3rd, lasted for less than two-tenths of a second.

Although the gamma rays disappeared quickly, GRB 130603B also displayed a slowly fading glow dominated by infrared light. Its brightness and behavior didn't match a typical "afterglow," which is created when a high-speed jet of particles slams into the surrounding environment. 

Instead, the glow behaved like it came from exotic radioactive elements. The neutron-rich material ejected by colliding neutron stars can generate such elements, which then undergo radioactive decay, emitting a glow that's dominated by infrared light - exactly what the team observed. 

"We've been looking for a 'smoking gun' to link a short gamma-ray burst with a neutron star collision. The radioactive glow from GRB 130603B may be that smoking gun," explains Wen-fai Fong, a graduate student at the CfA and a co-author of the paper. 

The team calculates that about one-hundredth of a solar mass of material was ejected by the gamma-ray burst, some of which was gold. By combining the estimated gold produced by a single short GRB with the number of such explosions that have occurred over the age of the universe, all the gold in the cosmos might have come from gamma-ray bursts. 

"To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are all star stuff, and our jewelry is colliding-star stuff," says Berger. 

The team's results have been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and are available online. Berger's co-authors are Wen-fai Fong and Ryan Chornock, both of the CfA. 

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

For more information, contact:

David A. Aguilar
Director of Public Affairs
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
617-495-7462
daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu
 
Christine Pulliam
Public Affairs Specialist
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
617-495-7463
cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu

NASA's Fermi, Swift See 'Shockingly Bright' Burst

The maps in this animation show how the sky looks at gamma-ray energies above 100 million electron volts (MeV) with a view centered on the north galactic pole. The first frame shows the sky during a three-hour interval prior to GRB 130427A. The second frame shows a three-hour interval starting 2.5 hours before the burst, and ending 30 minutes into the event. The Fermi team chose this interval to demonstrate how bright the burst was relative to the rest of the gamma-ray sky. This burst was bright enough that Fermi autonomously left its normal surveying mode to give the LAT instrument a better view, so the three-hour exposure following the burst does not cover the whole sky in the usual way. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration.

› Larger animated image

› Side-by-side static image with labels

› Unlabeled side-by-side image

 

This animation shows a more detailed Fermi LAT view of GRB 130427A. The sequence shows high-energy (100 Mev to 100 GeV) gamma rays from a 20-degree-wide region of the sky starting three minutes before the burst to 14 hours after. Following an initial one-second spike, the LAT emission remained relatively quiet for the next 15 seconds while Fermi's GBM instrument showed bright, variable lower-energy emission. Then the burst re-brightened in the LAT over the next few minutes and remained bright for nearly half a day.
Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration.  › Larger animated image

 

Swift's X-Ray Telescope took this 26.5-second exposure of GRB 130427A at 3:50 a.m. EDT on April 27, just moments after Swift and Fermi triggered on the outburst. The image is 6.5 arcminutes across. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler.  › Larger image 

The burst subsequently was detected in optical, infrared and radio wavelengths by ground-based observatories, based on the rapid accurate position from Swift. Astronomers quickly learned that the GRB was located about 3.6 billion light-years away, which for these events is relatively close.

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers think most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse under their own weight. As the core collapses into a black hole, jets of material shoot outward at nearly the speed of light.

The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time.

If the GRB is near enough, astronomers usually discover a supernova at the site a week or so after the outburst.

"This GRB is in the closest 5 percent of bursts, so the big push now is to find an emerging supernova, which accompanies nearly all long GRBs at this distance," said Goddard's Neil Gehrels, principal investigator for Swift.

Ground-based observatories are monitoring the location of GRB 130427A and expect to find an underlying supernova by midmonth.

Related Links

› Download additional graphics from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio
› Archive of GRB notices from the Gamma-ray Coordination Network
› "NASA's Fermi Telescope Sees Most Extreme Gamma-ray Blast Yet" (02.19.09)
› NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
› NASA's Swift mission

 

Francis Reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Dying Supergiant Stars Implicated in Hours-long Gamma-Ray Bursts

Three unusually long-lasting stellar explosions discovered by NASA’s Swift satellite represent a previously unrecognized class of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Two international teams of astronomers studying these events conclude that they likely arose from the catastrophic death of supergiant stars hundreds of times larger than the sun. 

Three recent GRBs (blue dots) emitted high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray light over time spans up to 100 times greater than typical long bursts and constitute a new ultra-long class. This plot compares the energy received and the event duration among different classes of transient high-energy events: long GRBs (green); the disruption of an asteroid or comet by a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole in our own galaxy, or the break-out of a supernova shock wave in another galaxy (orange); and the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole in another galaxy (purple). Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, after B. Gendre (ASDC/INAF-OAR/ARTEMIS).  › Larger image - › High res image

 

Three recent GRBs (blue dots) emitted high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray light over time spans up to 100 times greater than typical long bursts and constitute a new ultra-long class. This plot compares the energy received and the event duration among different classes of transient high-energy events: long GRBs (green); the disruption of an asteroid or comet by a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole in our own galaxy, or the break-out of a supernova shock wave in another galaxy (orange); and the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole in another galaxy (purple). Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, after B. Gendre (ASDC/INAF-OAR/ARTEMIS).  › Larger image - › High res image

"We have seen thousands of gamma-ray bursts over the past four decades, but only now are we seeing a clear picture of just how extreme these extraordinary events can be," said Bruce Gendre, a researcher now associated with the French National Center for Scientific Research who led this study while at the Italian Space Agency's Science Data Center in Frascati, Italy.

Prior to Swift's launch in 2004, satellite instruments were much less sensitive to gamma-ray bursts that unfolded over comparatively long time scales.

Traditionally, astronomers have recognized two GRB types, short and long, based on the duration of the gamma-ray signal. Short bursts last two seconds or less and are thought to represent a merger of compact objects in a binary system, with the most likely suspects being neutron stars and black holes. Long GRBs may last anywhere from several seconds to several minutes, with typical durations falling between 20 and 50 seconds. These events are thought to be associated with the collapse of a star many times the sun's mass and the resulting birth of a new black hole.

Both scenarios give rise to powerful jets that propel matter at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions. As they interact with matter in and around the star, the jets produce a spike of high-energy light.

Gendre and his colleagues made a detailed study of GRB 111209A, which erupted on Dec. 9, 2011, using gamma-ray data from the Konus instrument on NASA's Wind spacecraft, X-ray observations from Swift and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite, and optical data from the TAROT robotic observatory in La Silla, Chile. The burst continued to produce high-energy emission for an astonishing seven hours, making it by far the longest-duration GRB ever recorded. The team's findings appear in the March 20 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

Another event, GRB 101225A, exploded on Christmas Day in 2010 and produced high-energy emission for at least two hours. Subsequently nicknamed the "Christmas burst," the event's distance was unknown, which led two teams to arrive at radically different physical interpretations. One group concluded the blast was caused by an asteroid or comet falling onto a neutron star within our own galaxy. Another team determined that the burst was the outcome of a merger event in an exotic binary system located some 3.5 billion light-years away.

GRB 101225A, better known as the "Christmas burst," was an unusually long-lasting gamma-ray burst. Because its distance was not measured, astronomers came up with two radically different interpretations. In the first, a solitary neutron star in our own galaxy shredded and accreted an approaching comet-like body. In the second, a neutron star is engulfed by, spirals into and merges with an evolved giant star in a distant galaxy. Now, thanks to a measurement of the Christmas burst’s host galaxy, astronomers have determined that it represented the collapse and explosion of a supergiant star hundreds of times larger than the sun. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.  › Download video in HD formats  -  › Watch video on YouTube

The number, duration and burst class for GRBs observed by Swift are shown in this plot. Colors link each GRB class to illustrations above the plot, which show the estimated sizes of the source stars. For comparison, the width of the yellow circle represents a star about 20 percent larger than the sun. Credit: Andrew Levan, Univ. of Warwick.  › Larger image

 

Astronomers suggest that blue supergiant stars may be the most likely sources of ultra-long GRBs. These stars hold about 20 times the sun's mass and may reach sizes 1,000 times larger than the sun, making them nearly wide enough to span Jupiter's orbit. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger.  Larger image - High res image

 

"We now know that the Christmas burst occurred much farther off, more than halfway across the observable universe, and was consequently far more powerful than these researchers imagined," said Andrew Levan, an astronomer at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.

Using the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, Levan and his team obtained a spectrum of the faint galaxy that hosted the Christmas burst. This enabled the scientists to identify emission lines of oxygen and hydrogen and determine how much these lines were displaced to lower energies compared to their appearance in a laboratory. This difference, known to astronomers as a redshift, places the burst some 7 billion light-years away.

As a part of this study, which is described in a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, Levan's team also examined 111209A and the more recent burst 121027A, which exploded on Oct. 27, 2012. All show similar X-ray, ultraviolet and optical emission and all arose from the central regions of compact galaxies that were actively forming stars. The astronomers conclude that all three GRBs constitute a hitherto unrecognized group of "ultra-long" bursts.

To account for the normal class of long GRBs, astronomers envision a star similar to the sun's size but with many times its mass. The mass must be high enough for the star to undergo an energy crisis, with its core ultimately running out of fuel and collapsing under its own weight to form a black hole. Some of the matter falling onto the nascent black hole becomes redirected into powerful jets that drill through the star, creating the gamma-ray spike, but because this burst is short-lived, the star must be comparatively small.

"Wolf-Rayet stars fit these requirements," explained Levan. "They are born with more than 25 times the sun's mass, but they burn so hot that they drive away their deep, outermost layer of hydrogen as an outflow we call a stellar wind." Stripping away the star's atmosphere leaves an object massive enough to form a black hole but small enough for the particle jets to drill all the way through in times typical of long GRBs.

Because ultra-long GRBs persist for periods up to 100 times greater than long GRBs, they require a stellar source of correspondingly greater physical size. Both groups suggest that the likely candidate is a supergiant, a star with about 20 times the sun's mass that still retains its deep hydrogen atmosphere, making it hundreds of times the sun's diameter.

Gendre's team goes further, suggesting that GRB 111209A marked the death of a blue supergiant containing relatively modest amounts of elements heavier than helium, which astronomers call metals.

"The metal content of a massive star controls the strength of its stellar wind, which determines how much of the hydrogen atmosphere it retains as it grows older," Gendre notes. The star's deep hydrogen envelope would take hours to complete its fall into the black hole, which would provide a long-lived fuel source to power an ultra-long GRB jet.

Metal content also plays a strong role in the development of long GRBs, according to a detailed study presented by John Graham and Andrew Fruchter, both astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Stars make heavy elements throughout their energy-producing lives and during supernova explosions, and each generation of stars enriches interstellar gas with a greater proportion of them. While astronomers have noted that long GRBs occur much more frequently in metal-poor galaxies, a few of them have suggested that this pattern is not intrinsic to the stars and their environments.

To examine this possibility, Graham and Fruchter developed a novel method that allowed them to compare galaxies by their underlying rates of star formation. They then examined galaxies that served as hosts for long GRBs and various types of supernovae as well as a control sample of 20,000 typical galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The astronomers found that 75 percent of long GRBs occurred among the 10 percent of star formation with the lowest metal content. While the study found a few long GRBs in environments with high-metal content, like our own galaxy, these occur at only about 4 percent the rate seen in low-metal environments per unit of underlying star formation.

"Most stars form in metal-rich environments, and this has a side effect of decreasing the prevalence of long GRBs as the universe grows older," Graham explained. "And while a nearby long GRB would be catastrophic to life on Earth, our study shows that galaxies like our own are much less likely to produce them."

The astronomers suspect this pattern reflects a difference in how well a massive star manages to retain its rotation speed. Rising metal content means stronger stellar winds. As these winds push material off the star's surface, the star's rotation gradually decreases in much the same way as a spinning ice skater slows when she extends her arms. Stars with more rapid rotation may be more likely to produce a long GRB.

Graham and Fruchter hypothesize that the few long GRBs found in high-metal environments received an assist from the presence of a nearby companion star. By feeding mass -- and with it, rotational energy -- onto the star that explodes, a companion serves as the physical equivalent of someone pushing a slowly spinning ice skater back up to a higher rotational speed.

Related Links:

• Download the video and additional graphics from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

• › University of Warwick press release

• › INAF press release

• Paper: "The Ultra-long Gamma-Ray Burst 111209A: The Collapse of a Blue Supergiant?" B. Genre et al.

• Paper: "A new population of ultra-long duration gamma-ray bursts." A.J. Levan et al.

• › Paper: "The Metal Aversion of LGRBs." J. F. Graham and A. S. Fruchter.

• › "NASA's Swift Finds a Gamma-Ray Burst with a Dual Personality (11.30.11)"

• › NASA's Swift mission

• › NASA's Wind spacecraft

• › The TAROT observatories

• › CNRS press release

Francis Reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Galaxy's Gamma-Ray Flares Erupted Far From its Black Hole

In 2011, a months-long blast of energy launched by an enormous black hole almost 11 billion years ago swept past Earth. Using a combination of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the world's largest radio telescope, astronomers have zeroed in on the source of this ancient outburst.

 Theorists expect gamma-ray outbursts occur only in close proximity to a galaxy's central black hole, the powerhouse ultimately responsible for the activity. A few rare observations suggested this is not the case.

 The 2011 flares from a galaxy known as 4C +71.07 now give astronomers the clearest and most distant evidence that the theory still needs some work. The gamma-ray emission originated about 70 light-years away from the galaxy's central black hole.

Prior to its strong outbursts in 2011, blazar 4C +71.07 was a weak source for Fermi’s LAT. These images centered on 4C +71.07 show the rate at which the LAT detected gamma rays with energies above 100 million electron volts; lighter colors equal higher rates. The image at left covers 2.5 years, from the start of Fermi’s mission to 2011. The image at right shows 10 weeks of activity in late 2011, when 4C +71.07 produced its strongest outburst. A more frequently active blazar, S5 0716+71, appears in both images.
Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration .  › Larger image - › Larger image (unlabeled)

The 4C +71.07 galaxy was discovered as a source of strong radio emission in the 1960s. NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, which operated in the 1990s, detected high-energy flares, but the galaxy was quiet during Fermi's first two and a half years in orbit.

 In early November 2011, at the height of the outburst, the galaxy was more than 10,000 times brighter than the combined luminosity of all of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

 "This renewed activity came after a long slumber, and that's important because it allows us to explicitly link the gamma-ray flares to the rising emission observed by radio telescopes," said David Thompson, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

 Located in the constellation Ursa Major, 4C +71.07 is so far away that its light takes 10.6 billion years to reach Earth. Astronomers are seeing this galaxy as it existed when the universe was less than one-fourth of its present age.

At the galaxy's core lies a supersized black hole weighing 2.6 billion times the sun's mass. Some of the matter falling toward the black hole becomes accelerated outward at almost the speed of light, creating dual particle jets blasting in opposite directions. One jet happens to point almost directly toward Earth. This characteristic makes 4C +71.07 a blazar, a classification that includes some of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the sky.

Boston University astronomers Alan Marscher and Svetlana Jorstad routinely monitor 4C +71.07 along with dozens of other blazars using several facilities, including the VLBA.

The instrument's 10 radio telescopes span North America, from Hawaii to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and possess the resolving power of a single radio dish more than 5,300 miles across when their signals are combined. As a result, The VLBA resolves detail about a million times smaller than Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) and 1,000 times smaller than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

In autumn 2011, the VLBA images revealed a bright knot that appeared to move outward at a speed 20 times faster than light.

"Although this apparent speed was an illusion caused by actual motion almost directly toward us at 99.87 percent the speed of light, this knot was the key to determining the location where the gamma-rays were produced in the black hole's jet," said Marscher, who presented the findings Monday, Jan. 7, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif.

VLBA and Fermi provided complementary observations of the blazar outburst.

Top: During the most intense episode of gamma-ray flaring, VLBA radio maps and polarization measurements, among other observations, linked a bright knot in the jet of 4C +71.07 to variations in brightness in visible and gamma-ray light. The knot appeared to move outward at 20 times the speed of light, an illusion caused by motion almost directly toward us at 99.87 percent the speed of light.

Bottom: The rise and fall of the blazar's gamma-ray brightness as recorded by Fermi's LAT in late 2011 and early 2012.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/A. Marscher and S.Jorstad (BU) . › Larger image

The knot passed through a bright stationary feature of the jet, which the astronomers refer to as its radio "core," on April 9, 2011. This occurred within days of Fermi's detection of renewed gamma-ray flaring in the blazar. Marscher and Jorstad noted that the blazar brightened at visible wavelengths in step with the higher-energy emission.

During the most intense period of flaring, from October 2011 to January 2012, the scientists found the polarization direction of the blazar's visible light rotated in the same manner as radio emissions from the knot. They concluded the knot was responsible for the visible and the gamma-ray light, which varied in sync.

This association allowed the researchers to pinpoint the location of the gamma-ray outburst to about 70 light-years from the black hole.

The astronomers think that the gamma rays were produced when electrons moving near the speed of light within the jet collided with visible and infrared light originating outside of the jet. Such a collision can kick the light up to much higher energies, a process known as inverse-Compton scattering.

The source of the lower-energy light is unclear at the moment. The researchers speculate the source may be an outer, slow-moving sheath that surrounds the jet. Nicholas MacDonald, a graduate student at Boston University, is investigating how the gamma-ray brightness should change in this scenario to compare with observations. "The VLBA is the only instrument that can bring us images from so near the edge of a young supermassive black hole, and Fermi's LAT is the only instrument that can see the highest-energy light from the galaxy's jet," said Jorstad.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. Fermi is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

The VLBA is operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

The Very Long Baseline Array is a system of ten radio telescopes spanning 5,500 miles that work together as the world's largest dedicated astronomical instrument. Each station consists of an 82-foot-diameter, 240-ton dish antenna and an adjacent control building. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center . › Larger image - › Larger image (no labels)

Related Links

• "Active Galaxies Flare and Fade in Fermi Telescope All-Sky Movie" (04.03.09)

• "NASA's Fermi Mission, Namibia's HESS Telescopes Explore a Blazar" (03.18.09)

• Active Galaxies and Quasars on NASA's "Imagine the Universe!"

• The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)

Francis Reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

Text issued as NASA Headquarters Release No. 13-004

J. D. Harrington
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-5241
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

Lynn Chandler
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-2806
 lynn.chandler-1@nasa.gov

Where Do the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Come From? Probably Not from Gamma-Ray Bursts

The IceCube Collaboration, in which Berkeley Lab is a crucial contributor, has taken the first steps toward clearing up a cosmic mystery – and made the mystery more intriguing

IceCube’s 5,160 digital optical modules are suspended from 86 strings reaching a mile and a half below the surface at the South Pole. Each sphere contains a photomultiplier tube and electronics to capture the faint flashes of muons speeding through the ice, their direction and energy – and thus that of the neutrinos that created them – tracked by multiple detections. At lower left is the processed signal of an energetic muon moving upward through the array, created by a neutrino that traveled all the way through the Earth.

The IceCube neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice under the South Pole, a volume seeded with an array of 5,160 sensitive digital optical modules (DOMs) that precisely track the direction and energy of speeding muons, massive cousins of the electron that are created when neutrinos collide with atoms in the ice. The IceCube Collaboration recently announced the results of an exhaustive search for high-energy neutrinos that would likely be produced if the violent extragalactic explosions known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

“According to a leading model, we would have expected to see 8.4 events corresponding to GRB production of neutrinos in the IceCube data used for this search,” says Spencer Klein of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who is a long-time member of the IceCube Collaboration. “We didn’t see any, which indicates that GRBs are not the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.”

“This result represents a coming-of-age of neutrino astronomy,” says Nathan Whitehorn from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the recent GRB research with Peter Redl of the University of Maryland. “IceCube, while still under construction, was able to rule out 15 years of predictions and has begun to challenge one of only two major possibilities for the origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays, namely gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei.”

Redl says, “While not finding a neutrino signal originating from GRBs was disappointing, this is the first neutrino astronomy result that is able to strongly constrain extra-galactic astrophysics models, and therefore marks the beginning of an exciting new era of neutrino astronomy.”

The IceCube Collaboration’s report on the search appears in the April 19, 2012, issue of the journal Nature.


Blazing fireballs and nature’s accelerators

Cosmic rays are energetic particles from deep in outer space – predominately protons, the bare nuclei of hydrogen atoms, plus some heavier atomic nuclei. Most probably acquire their energy when naturally accelerated by exploding stars. A few rare cosmic rays pack an astonishing wallop, however, with energies prodigiously greater than the highest ever attained by human-made accelerators like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Their sources are a mystery.

“Nature is capable of accelerating elementary particles to macroscopic energies,” says Francis Halzen, IceCube’s principal investigator and a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There are basically only two ideas on how she does this: in gravitationally driven particle flows near the supermassive black holes at the centers of active galaxies, and in the collapse of stars to a black hole, seen by astronomers as gamma ray bursts.”

Klein, the deputy director of Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division (NSD, explains that in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) “the black holes suck in matter and eject enormous particle jets, perpendicular to the galactic disk, which could act as strong linear accelerators.” Of gamma-ray bursts he says, “Some GRBs are thought to be collapses of supermassive stars – hypernova – while others are thought to be collisions of black holes with other black holes or neutron stars. Both types produce brief but intense blasts of radiation.”

The massive fireballs move away from the explosion at nearly the speed of light, releasing most of their energy as gamma rays. The fireballs that give rise to this radiation might also accelerate particles to very high energies through a jet mechanism similar to that in AGNs, although compressed into a much smaller volume.

A fireball produced in a black-hole collision or by the collapse of a gigantic star can form jets in which protons and heavier nuclei are accelerated and shock waves produce a burst of gamma rays. The fireball model also predicts the creation of very high energy neutrinos, which ought to be detectable shortly after the gamma-ray burst becomes visible from Earth. (Image credit Dana Berry and NASA)

Accelerated protons in a GRB’s jets should interact with the intense gamma-ray background and strong magnetic fields to produce neutrinos with energies about five percent of the proton energy, together with much higher-energy neutrinos near the end of the acceleration process.

Neutrinos come in three different types that change and mix as they travel to Earth; the total flux can be estimated from the muon neutrinos that IceCube concentrates on. The muons these neutrinos create can travel up to 10 kilometers through the Antarctic ice. Thus many neutrino interactions occur outside the actual dimensions of the IceCube array but are nevertheless visible to IceCube’s detectors, effectively enlarging the telescope’s aperture.

“The way we search for GRB neutrinos is that we build a huge detector and then we just watch and wait,” says Klein. “When it comes to detecting neutrinos, size really does matter.”

IceCube watches with its over 5,000 DOMs, digital optical modules conceived, designed, and proven by Berkeley Lab physicists and engineers, which detect the faint light from each passing muon. Scientists can rely on their remarkable dependability to wait as long as necessary. Almost no failures occurred after the DOMs were installed; 98 percent are working perfectly and another one percent are usable. Now frozen in the ice, they will never be seen again.

IceCube records a million times more muon tracks moving downward through the ice than upward, mainly debris from direct cosmic-ray hits on the surface or secondary products of cosmic-ray collisions with Earth’s atmosphere. Muons moving upward, however, signal neutrinos that have passed all the way through Earth. When the telescope is searching for bright neutrino sources in the northern sky, the planet makes a marvelous filter.

Zeroing in on gamma-ray bursts

A network of satellites circles the globe and reports almost 700 GRBs each year, which readily stand out from the cosmic background. They’re timed, their positions are triangulated, and the data are distributed by an international group of researchers. Some blaze for less than two seconds and others for a few minutes. Neutrinos they produce should arrive at IceCube during the burst or close to it.

“IceCube’s precision timing and charge resolution, plus its large size, allow it to precisely determine where a neutrino comes from – often to within one degree,” says Lisa Gerhardt of Berkeley Lab, whose research has focused on detecting ultra-high-energy neutrino interactions. Indeed, a GRB neutrino should send a muon track through the ice with an angular resolution of about one degree with respect to the GRB’s position in the sky.

IceCube researchers sifted through data on 307 GRBs from two periods in 2008 and 2009 when IceCube was still under construction, looking for records of muon trails coincident in time and space with GRBs. (Forty strings, with 60 DOMs each, had been installed by 2008, and 59 strings by 2009. The finished IceCube has 86 strings.) The fireball model predicted that when the expected flux from all the samples had been summed, at least 8.4 related muon events would be found within 10 degrees of a GRB during the seconds or minutes when it was blazing brightly.

“Different calculations of the neutrino flux from GRBs are based on slightly different assumptions about how the neutrinos are produced and on uncertainties such as how fast the fireball is moving toward us,” says Klein. “Among the published predictions, the lowest estimate of neutrino production is about a quarter of what the fireball model predicts. That’s barely consistent with our zero observations.”

Says Halzen, “After observing gamma-ray bursts for two years, we have not detected the telltale neutrinos for cosmic ray acceleration.”

If it’s likely that GRBs aren’t up to the task of accelerating cosmic rays to ultra-high-energies, what are the options? Klein points to a salient fact about natural accelerators: a small, rapidly spinning object must accelerate particles very rapidly; this requires an extremely energy-dense environment, and there are many ways the particles could lose energy during the acceleration process.

“But remember the other popular model of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, active galactic nuclei,” says Klein. “GRBs are small, but AGNs are big – great big accelerators that may be able to accelerate particles to very high energies without significant loss.”

Are AGNs the real source of the highest-energy cosmic rays? IceCube has looked for neutrinos from active galactic nuclei, but as yet the data sets are not sensitive enough to set significant limits. For now, IceCube has nothing to say on the subject – beyond the fact that the fireball model of GRBs can’t meet the specs.

###

“An absence of neutrinos associated with cosmic ray acceleration in gamma-ray bursts,” by R. Abbasi et al (the IceCube Collaboration), appears in the April 19, 2012, issue of Nature and is available online to subscribers at http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html. Collaboration members currently or formerly with Berkeley Lab include Keith Beattie, Kirill Filimonov, Lisa Gerhardt, Ariel Goldschmidt, Chang Hyon Ha, Spencer Klein, Howard Matis, Sandra Miarecki, David Nygren, Gerald Przybylski, Thorsten Stezelberger, and Robert Stokstad; Filimonov, Gerhardt, Ha, Klein, and Miarecki are also with the University of California at Berkeley.

The IceCube Collaboration includes over 260 researchers from 42 institutions in 11 countries and is supported by agencies and foundations in Belgium, Germany, Japan, and Sweden, with primary funding from the National Science Foundation and major support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Visit the IceCube website at http://icecube.wisc.edu/, read the press release concerning this work at http://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/52, and access a selection of images at http://icecube.wisc.edu/~norris/nature_press/.

At Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Office of Science supports participation in IceCube primarily through the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Visit http://www.nersc.gov/.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.

Scientific contact:

Spencer Klein,
510-486-5470,
Email: srklein@lbl.gov

NASA's Swift Finds a Gamma-Ray Burst With a Dual Personality

This animation illustrates two wildly different explanations for GRB 101225A, better known as the "Christmas burst." First, a solitary neutron star in our own galaxy shreds and accretes an approaching comet-like body. In the second, a neutron star is engulfed by, spirals into and merges with an evolved giant star in a distant galaxy. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) . Download this video and related content from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

WASHINGTON -- A peculiar cosmic explosion first detected by NASA's Swift observatory on Christmas Day 2010 was caused either by a novel type of supernova located billions of light-years away or an unusual collision much closer to home, within our own galaxy. Papers describing both interpretations appear in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Nature.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the universe's most luminous explosions, emitting more energy in a few seconds than our sun will during its entire energy-producing lifetime. What astronomers are calling the "Christmas burst" is so unusual that it can be modeled in such radically different ways.

"What the Christmas burst seems to be telling us is that the family of gamma-ray bursts is more diverse than we fully appreciate,” said Christina Thoene, the supernova study's lead author, at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain. It's only by rapidly detecting hundreds of them, as Swift is doing, that we can catch some of the more eccentric siblings."

Common to both scenarios is the presence of a neutron star, the crushed core that forms when a star many times the sun's mass explodes. When the star's fuel is exhausted, it collapses under its own weight, compressing its core so much that about a half-million times Earth's mass is squeezed into a sphere no larger than a city.

The Christmas burst, also known as GRB 101225A, was discovered in the constellation Andromeda by Swift's Burst Alert Telescope at 1:38 p.m. EST on Dec. 25, 2010. The gamma-ray emission lasted at least 28 minutes, which is unusually long. Follow-up observations of the burst's afterglow by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories were unable to determine the object's distance.

Thoene's team proposes that the burst occurred in an exotic binary system where a neutron star orbited a normal star that had just entered its red giant phase, enormously expanding its outer atmosphere. This expansion engulfed the neutron star, resulting in both the ejection of the giant's atmosphere and rapid tightening of the neutron star's orbit.

Once the two stars became wrapped in a common envelope of gas, the neutron star may have merged with the giant's core after just five orbits, or about 18 months. The end result of the merger was the birth of a black hole and the production of oppositely directed jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light, followed by a weak supernova.

The particle jets produced gamma rays. Jet interactions with gas ejected before the merger explain many of the burst's signature oddities. Based on this interpretation, the event took place about 5.5 billion light-years away, and the team has detected what may be a faint galaxy at the right location.

"Deep exposures using Hubble may settle the nature of this object," said Sergio Campana, who led the collision study at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy.

If it is indeed a galaxy, that would be evidence for the binary model. On the other hand, if NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory finds an X-ray point source or if radio telescopes detect a pulsar, that goes against it.

Campana's team supports an alternative model that involves the tidal disruption of a large comet-like object and the ensuing crash of debris onto a neutron star located only about 10,000 light-years away. The scenario requires the break-up of an object with about half the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres. While rare in the asteroid belt, such objects are thought to be common in the icy Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. Similar objects located far away from the neutron star may have survived the supernova that formed it.

Gamma-ray emission occurred when debris fell onto the neutron star. Clumps of cometary material likely made a few orbits, with different clumps following different paths before settling into a disk around the neutron star. X-ray variations detected by Swift's X-Ray Telescope that lasted several hours may have resulted from late-arriving clumps that struck the neutron star as the disk formed.

In the early years of studying GRBs, astronomers had very few events to study in detail and dozens of theories to explain them. In the Swift era, astronomers have settled into two basic scenarios, either the collapse of a massive star or the merger of a compact binary system.

"The beauty of the Christmas burst is that we must invoke two exotic scenarios to explain it, but such rare oddballs will help us advance the field,” said Chryssa Kouveliotou, a co-author of the supernova study at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

NASA's Swift was launched in November 2004 and is managed by Goddard. It is operated in collaboration with several U.S. institutions and partners in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Japan.

Francis Reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.